Optimizing Personalized Touristic Itineraries by a Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithm

Abstract

The paper presents an electronic tourist guide, relying on an evolutionary optimizer, able to plan personalized multiple-day itineraries by considering several contrasting objectives. Since the itinerary planning can be modeled as an extension of the NP-complete team orienteering problem with time windows, a multiobjective evolutionary optimizer is proposed to find in reasonable times near-optimal solutions to such an extension. This optimizer automatically designs the itinerary by aiming at maximizing the tourists’ satisfaction as a function of their personal preferences and environmental constraints, such as operating hours, visiting times and accessibility of the points of interests, and weather forecasting. Experimental evaluations have demonstrated that the proposed optimizer is effective in different simulated operating conditions.